The Old Lady in the Rocking Chair

"Copyright Owen Jones 2013 (c)"

By:Owen Jones

We five children were brought up in the same house by our parents during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. In
the Seventies, some momentous occasions took place for us: I left home to go to university, our mother died,
our father remarried and moved out and my next brother took over our old house.

It was quite an upheaval for our not so small family. They had been very pleasant, happy years for all of us and
I for one missed the warm, homely atmosphere of our old house.

After five years at university, I moved to the Netherlands to live for ten years, so I was actually away from it
for fifteen years, when I returned to my home town to live. My brother, the one with our old house was in the
middle of a divorce and he offered to put me up.

I jumped at the chance to be able to sleep under our old roof again. I was hoping that there would still be
happy memories there for me, although another woman had put her stamp on the place, changing it quite a bit.

I was given the medium-sized bedroom at the back of the house - the one that had been our parents' bedroom when
I had last lived there. Four brothers had had the master bedroom and I had had the box room, so that I could study
in private too.

My brother was working very hard all day, whereas I was unemployed and had nothing to do. I had enough money to
be able to afford a break from work for a few months, so that was what I decided to do. I still had a few friends
left in town, but basically I was estranged, so I offered to help my brother redecorate while he was out during the
day and on the weekends.

I enjoyed his company when we were working together, over our evening meals and over a few drinks in the
evening. Our parents had been spiritualists and Dad was still an active healer, so we were used to hearing stories
that most people would call 'strange' and we enjoyed recounting them to each other.

However, my brother had fifteen years worth of stories that I had never heard and so I used to let him take
centre stage most of the time so that he could bring me up to date with the goings on in our old house, which of
course was his now.

My brother was a carpenter by trade, so he had done all the renovation work on the house himself. He told me of
jewellery that he had found behind skirting boards that could only have been put there, but put there by what? Not
by whom?

Nobody had ever seen rodents in the house and the skirtings fitted perfectly as Dad was a master carpenter
himself and had lived there for more than twenty years. Children? Unlikely if the skirtings were a tight fit. So
what?

We had no trouble believing that ghosts or mischievous spirits had been the culprits.

My brother had also found items in the chimney, although we had had a coal fire for nearly thirty years and the
house was only ten years old when our parents had moved in. He had found a small tin and a small slipper on a shelf
in the chimney, which surely should have burned in the heat of an open fire.

He had found coins old and new and brooches that we had never owned. There were items under the floor boards
that were more easily explained away, but which did not really make sense either.

Neither of us, nor anyone else in our family found these stories unusual or frightening. After all, we had heard
them all our lives and we had grown up in the house and not come to any harm because of it.

One night, I was lying in bed after my brother and I had been to a party at the house of one of his friend's. We
had both drunken too much and gone straight to bed with a nightcap of whisky. As usual, it had seemed like a good
idea at the time, but was superfluous. It remained on my night table, while I tried to sleep.

I have never been good at getting to sleep, so I just lay there listening to the sounds of the house 'settling'.
I slowly became aware of a rhythmic creaking. Wood on wood, like a rocking chair on a wooden porch.

We didn't have one and it was far too late for anyone else to be rocking, not that we would have been able to
hear them anyway. I listened intently, trying to put the noise down to a loose eave, or a broken branch swaying in
the wind, but nothing fitted really.

I listened and as I listened, the sound seemed to grow louder or maybe I was so focused on it by then, that I
had excluded all other sounds from my senses. I reached out, took my tumbler of whisky, downed it in one and lay
back to listen to the rhythmic creaking.

It was not annoying; in fact it was soothing and the next thing I knew I was waking up with the sun shining
through the window. My brother was calling me for breakfast.

It was a family tradition to discuss our dreams over breakfast and I had sorely missed it for fifteen years. I
began to tell my brother about the creaking.

"Oh, I was wondering when you would meet our Old Lady. Dad said she moved in to that room shortly after Mum
died. We don't know who she is, she has never said, but sometimes we pass her on the stairs or see her in the
kitchen. Most of the time though, she just rocks in a chair and stares out of the window in that bedroom that you
are in. Why don't you try talking to her as you'll be living with her for a while?"

"But why didn't you tell me about her?" I asked incredulously.

"I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice her and what you would both do about each other," he
replied calmly with a wicked smile.